Green Baby

OK I can not title this post "green baby" without mentioning my new favorite baby store in Houston... Bebe Verde (Green Baby) on W Alabama.
If you have not been, find an excuse to go and support a great local store.
So, now that I have plugged them with my blog title.

I wanted to talk about feeding Gus.
Gus was introduced to Greens last week and loved it and here are pics to prove it.
If you can not see the color... his little food mustache is green.

It is funny. Because before I had him I looked everywhere for a good raw baby book.
I thought... "really, why has no one made a great raw baby book?" Well, now I know.
It is such a no brainer... there is no need for a book! I mean feeding a baby raw foods is easier then anything I ever did to feed Astrid. I made my own baby food with her... and it wasn't hard... but raw makes that look like a complicated mess.

I guess the blender is the secret. Having such a high powered blender (Vitamix) does help.
But I believe 100% you could do it with any blender.

My tips have to include this... the Munchkin. It is a miracle of modern parenting. You put the raw chunks of food into a mesh pouch that shuts and baby can hold and gum til his teething hearts content. It works amazingly for avocado, banana, and apples, nectarines, peaches, pears, etc. Or for putting in frozen blended baby food which satisfies Gus' teething woos much more then any frozen plastic teether ever could.

So blending and spooning is all that feeding your baby raw involves.
I mean here are the instructions... check out how easy my mornings are...
Raw pear w/ skins and all into the Vitamix
Add a handful of spinach and a bit of water if it needs a bit of help getting going.
Blend (Gus does not like this part so I need to sooth him while the blender runs)
Spoon up into babies happy and contented mouth.
If you want to add infant cereal just spoon into whatever fruit or veg you have blended up.

Here is what I have introduced (all raw- except rice), in order of what he tried first.
Gus turned 8 mo yesterday.
Oh and Gus was very interested in food early on... so avocado play time served us well for a few months.

1. Avocado (first food)
2. Banana
3. Pear
4. Apple
5. Spinach
6. Nectarine
7. Peach
8. Brown Rice Baby Cereal (Happybellies or Earth's Best)
9. Brown Rice
10. Carrots
11. Next I will add peas (raw of course, why not!)

If I want to get fancy or if I have some extra... I spoon that into baby freezer trays vs ice cube trays (beware harmful BPA). And can pop those into the Munchkin feeder or a bowl to warm.
Freezing raw food only breaks down a small amount of the nutrients/ enzymes. So, it is much better then cooking it.

Why raw for baby?

• It is easy. Why cook?
• Easy digestion - enzymes intact it is closer to the ease of digesting breastmilk.
• Healthier intestines - which means less allergies later, less fussiness, better health.
• More nutrition - raw and organic... best there is nutritionally. Nutrient dense foods.
• Best food ever - it is food it is purest state for the purest baby in his rawest state :)

I need to ask my friend about Spirilina. I know that was her babies first food.
Next post superfoods for baby.

Smaller can be BETTER

Think a great small purse. Bigger is not always better. I know, it is almost a death sentence for someone from Texas, living in Texas to say! This is actually where the idea of "flat living" came from for me. I was thinking about living in a smaller place... and I thought about how most of the world (besides the US) lives in much smaller homes and have much less space. And in the last 20 years big has gotten bigger and bigger. Working in home design I always was drawn to smaller, cleaner lines and smaller furniture... but most of the homes I would work in had such large (or "Great") rooms that you had to use furniture with large backs and arms just to fill the space.
Everything has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Closets (more room to store the stuff), garages (more room for the bigger car), bigger beds (King was not big enough), bigger kitchens, refrigerators (in Europe the average size of a fridge is apartment size here). I started thinking about living in a "flat"... OK it just made me feel stylish. In say Germany or France... a family our size and with our income would live in a small "flat" with no yard... kids play on the streets and go to parks. Ya know?

I had to challenge my notion of "success" (is success living paycheck to paycheck and living for a house and car?), of "standard of living" (what kind of a standard were we living? ), of "failure" (if it was failure to let go of a house that was a burden, then we had already failed... now what?), etc.

Most of these notions have come from living the lifestyle that is presented as the norm. But, we were being driven and challenged to live differently.

So we looked at smaller. And guess what, smaller can be BETTER.
When I started... it started with a simple "What if?" God kind of whispered it to me.
What if you lived in the Mason house behind Ecclesia? Our church had purchased a duplex behind the church building and the short term plans were to rent it out. We decided to sell our house with the idea we would live there for a year... tiny 3 bedroom with a new church playground in the back.

Then.. Ike hit. The hurricane wiped out a large chunk of Galveston and headed straight for Houston in a direct hit. Our home was not effected... and the buyers were lined up. BUT, the Mason house took some more damage to it's already beat up exterior and construction in the city ground to a hault.

Time for plan B.
Plan B was easy because we already were looking at schools. Plan B included taking Astrid out of private Montessori and putting her into Public Montessori. The hitch... the only way to get her in was to move into the neighborhood. But the cost of tuition being removed... made a small home in a very nice central neighborhood affordable. So plan B became an amazing neighborhood that I have always loved and thought I could never afford. Thinking smaller can sometimes mean thinking BIGGER!

So, now we are feeling like we have been given an amazing new start. We feel... like not only have we not sacrificed... but that God is amazing us with more then we could have hoped for.

Sometimes it is just about turning it upside down to look at it a different way!

Finances -part 1 of the Dave & Dave plan

OK I know, it is funny to have a big picture of Dave Ramsey on my blog which tends to be very spiritual, airy, and poetic. A big pic of Dave is kind of hysterical. In fact his pic was a little bit too big and I had to shrink it a bit, Vyk suggested making it flat!

Vyk & I are followers of Dave Ramsey. We admit it.
When you are looking for advice on radically changing your finances, Dave Ramsey is a good place to start. And although he has been getting on my nerves a bit lately about the election... specifically his ideas about what will happen when / if Obama wins... generally, the man makes a lot of sense.

We have been living the Dave Ramsey plan for financial peace since we took his course when I was pregnant with Gus. His basic tenants are stop borrowing & live on what you have. Meaning cash only purchases and no debt. You use an envelope to section off the money you have and when you do not have $ for say a new shirt... you just do not buy it... or maybe you wait (I know it is an amazing concept). It has helped us do better with what we have.

But now... better, is not what we are going for. Best, radical, upside down living. Or as Dave says "Live like no one else so you can live like no one else".

So what does all of this really mean in cold hard numbers.
Here are the goals of this move and "Flat Living" in general for our finances:
1. Pay off car (13% interest rate)- We are achieving this goal by throwing money at the car.
Meaning when we have extra $ esp the 2nd week of the month, we add it to the car payment.
2. Savings- starting with an emergency fund and ending with a goal of saving between 7-10 thousand dollars in a year!
3. Debt free- the car being paid off gets us there.. no new debt, etc.
4. Follow the baby steps that Dave sets out. He has common sense about $ and we sometimes do not. So when all else fails follow Dave.
5. To give! 10% tithe and giving extra to people, causes, etc that we believe in and follow.

Dandelions

I was looking at a website of a women who is a lifestyle coach. She is a Christian and a raw foodist in the Houston area. As I read, I was amazed... she talked about dandelions.. which I had heard all about. This time I guess I saw it with new eyes.
She was talking about how dandelions have loads of vitamins and minerals and also are extremely cleansing. That they provide all of the things that our modern diet is so deficient in.
And if we would stop killing them with herb asides and instead start eating them, our community and society would be much healthier.

While I was reading, I realized that THE CREATOR is so generous... and so thoughtful and so beautiful. Really, think about it. He sees our hurt, He sees our struggle, He sees how far removed we are from what we need and what He has provided for our bodies to thrive. And so he sets out gentle reminders, then more and more gentle reminders. Until those reminders and so rampant that we would have a hard time not seeing them.

They are there for us every day as we get in our cars and set out on our days, there for us when we return home with stress pumping through us. They become annoying in their presence, annoying in their perseverance. We can not make them leave! And all the while they provide the very thing that our modern society needs. If it were more obvious it would have bitten us.
Yes, I will be adding some dandelion to my salad.
And when I thank God for the food, it will be with new meaning.

Flat Living

New Blog for a new time in my life.

My old blog was all about raw foods and as I have not been living on a raw foods diet since I got pregnant with Gus it has been silent for a while.
This blog will be about raw foods, but it is also about everything else that God has and is taking me through and asking of me...

It is about "Flat Living" which is a concept that God showed me through prayer of what He wanted my life to look like.



The picture is of a life compressed, a lifestyle flattened... so that God has a bit more room... or hopefully a lot more room. Now do not get me wrong, I am not saying that God needs me to flatten everything so that He can be big. He is big no matter what I do. What I am saying is I am being called to make my life smaller so that He can be bigger in my life, and in the life of my family.

He has been working on me towards this for such a long time. And honestly I have not listened. I have been disobedient when he asked me to shrink. I believe when I first heard this concept it was presented to me in a way that made me believe when God asks us to be smaller it is not literal... it is just a spiritual concept. And I guess... if you want the results of this process only effecting your inward life... that would be fine. BUT, I want it to effect my outward life as well as my inward one. I want God's beauty to have room to grow and push out and bloom and overtake and envelop. In fact, it is that I have no other choice then to ask Him to take over where I have been sorely deficient in life.

More on what this actually means for my life later... because it means a lot of radical change.

But generally here are the areas I see for now that need to shrink:

• Finances - No debt (Dave Ramsey)
• Body - Raw foods (David Wolfe)
• Home - Smaller, simplify what we own.
• Car - Paid for and used less.
• Community - more unified (live closer to work, school, church, where you shop).
• Food- local, organic, whole, raw, less packaging.
• Trash - less trash.
• Carbon footprint - smaller.
• Consumerism- live on less. Buy used, fair trade, hand made.
• Giving out- when everything is smaller you can give out more.
  

What is beautiful... is all of these attempts to live smaller are circles... and all of the circles run together. This is how I KNOW this is the way we are intended to live (or at least closer to) and as our circles get bigger and bigger and less and less connected we will find more stress and less balance. We are living bigger and it is harder for us physically, emotionally, spiritually. This, I believe, is God's way of letting us know that this is not what He has intended for us.

I will post on each of these independently, so stay tuned.